Nearly ⅔ of the food crops used by humans depend on effective pollination by honey bees for optimum yields. Onions take two years to make a seed crop. There are times when the bees work an onion field very well, and others when they decide not to work at all. Onions are grown in more than 20 states. Domestic onion production in the U.S. alone consists of approximately 145,000 acres of onions, which produce about 6 billion pounds of onions each year. The U.S. industry accounts for 2.5 percent of the world onion acreage and 7 percent of the world production. The annual value of the U.S. crop is $800 million at the farmgate and nearly $3-4 billion at retail. In order, however, to achieve constancy of maximum production of the onions there must be pollination by the bees.
Pollination relies entirely on bees' self selection, and thus requires overstocking of bees for extended time periods. There is always a risk that in areas with a high abundance of other food sources, honey bees will not be effective pollinators, because of a tendency to exploit these other sources. Conditioning honey bees to search for specific vapors however would allow for selective pollination. The specific vapors for which the honey bees are conditioned to search need not be components of the natural environment. For example, explosives and compounds associated with illicit drug manufacture emit novel chemical vapors. These vapors are not components of the natural environment. Honey bees could be conditioned to identify unexploded ordinances (UXOs) and assist in clearing land mines. Using current technologies, finding the origin of novel chemical vapor sources like unexploded ordinances (UXOs) and buried land mines is difficult and time consuming. For example, in Croatia, clearing suspected mined area has the highest priority. There are more than 1,700 sq km that remain to be cleared in Croatia. Current clearing and demining occurs at an annual capacity of 50 sq km. Finding illicit drug manufacturing laboratories which also emit novel chemical odors is likewise difficult and time consuming. Since these vapors are not natural, there is no chance that bees can be used to detect and localize such compounds without conditioning.
Currently, there are no behavioral modification programs or equipment for conditioning honey bees to actively search for a single, non-reward producing source. Since standard methods for honey bee pollination generally rely entirely on chance and nature to accomplish pollination, the use of chemical attractants or repellents has proven to be unpredictable, with variable success.
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